In January 2012, Cait Reilly, a brave young woman from Birmingham, started a legal challenge on behalf of a quarter of a million unemployed people. Her judicial review case challenges this government's approach to getting unemployed people to work for nothing, or else risk losing their benefits. However, the government's Get Britain Working drive is about to come under intense judicial scrutiny. A high court judge recently ordered what amounts to a full hearing of the case which is to be heard over one and a half days in June.

Cait was forced out of her voluntary work in a local museum – she studied geology and aspired to a career in museums – into a one size fits all programme that required her to stack shelves at Poundland for free. She was told that if she refused, her £53-per-week jobseeker's allowance could be suspended. She was "guaranteed" training, a qualification in retail and a job interview; none of which materialised.

Cait soon came under sustained attack from the right-wing press as well as past and present conservative ministers, who coordinated a ruthless attack upon Britain's so-called "job snobs". Cait – their standard-bearer – bore the brunt. It turned out though, that Cait had identified an injustice that was to force high street shops nationwide to look closely and urgently at what they had signed up to. Activists took over stores, decrying what they saw as "slave labour".

Big businesses soon realised that these people were not upset about the type of work they were being told to undertake, but rather the mandatory and unpaid nature of that work. Many businesses pulled out of the schemes altogether, and the government was forced to remove the sanctions attached to a refusal to participate in their flagship sector-based work academy and work experience schemes.

However, huge numbers of unemployed people continue to face sanctions because the government's U-turn applies to those two schemes only. Cait's case has been linked to another in which our client was told to work unpaid for six months ("to begin with") or face losing his benefits. The government may have softened its approach when it comes to the young unemployed and where high street chains have withdrawn support, but older people are still being forced to work for free for months at a time in schemes similar to those being challenged in Cait's judicial review proceedings.

Britain is in the midst of its worst unemployment crisis in almost two decades. The government needed to respond robustly, but did so by choosing to import workfare; an idea attempted previously in the United States, Canada and Australia. Before it set up its own workfare programme, the Department for Work and Pensions commissioned expert independent research examining how the idea had worked in those countries.

The report concluded: "There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers"; and "Workfare is least effective in getting people into jobs in weak labour markets where unemployment is high."

Yet the coalition forged on, steaming headlong into the adoption of measures that now appear to have lost the support of the general public, not to mention the big businesses it had relied upon to implement the measures. What Cait and her co-claimant object to is the creation of the UK's own workfare model without official parliamentary approval of what these schemes should involve and to whom they should apply.

Instead, a plethora of confusing schemes have been dreamt up and implemented within Whitehall, granting a rare omnipotence to the Jobcentre Plus advisor, who faced with the nation's unemployed can sign droves of jobseekers into unpaid work with no account given to their needs, skills or skills gaps.

The high court now has an opportunity to apply basic administrative standards to this government initiative that we say has been created by disregarding basic principles of legality. We all want to see Britain working again, but no one is so worthless that they should be forced to work for nothing in return.

Phil Shiner is a solicitor at Public Interest Lawyers. He, alongside Jim Duffy, is acting in the cases referred to in this article